Coronavirus : Business Continuity & remote working requires Cybersecurity

(click on the image below to see the video)

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, remote working has become the most widely implemented action to enable business continuity in our growingly service-oriented world. In consequence, the enterprises are opening more doors, tunnels and vulnerabilities to enable the information flow between the corporate datacenter and remote workers.

During this difficult period where enterprises are mainly focused on their survival, and where security is considered as a low priority topic, the frequency of cyber-attacks exploiting various vulnerabilities is increasing at an exponential rate. These attacks, coupled with the capacity limits of national, regional and worldwide technical infrastructures are seriously shaking the fundamentals of security in terms of information confidentiality, integrity and business continuity.

More than ever, the convergence of Business Continuity and Information Security is becoming a must to implement, in order to reduce the financial, operational, legal and reputational impacts of the cyber-threats.

ACTAGIS, was interviewed on this subject by RTS on March 27, 2020.

Willing to share its expertise, ACTAGIS proposes some key security recommendations for remote working that will help you to strengthen the continuity of your activities.

1. Set up a crisis management organization (a manager and if possible, a team) that can identify, prioritize and coordinate the necessary actions for the business continuity including the remote working plan.

2. Identify and focus on the most critical key processes of your enterprise and allocate to them the needed resources (human, material and financial).

3. Develop and implement the “Information Technology Disaster Recovery Plan”

4. Establish security policies & guidelines to facilitate the usage of technological solutions.

5. Empower your remote workers with on-line awareness & training sessions for security & remote working best practices in order to mitigate the cyber-risks relative to videoconferencing-bombing, corona-phishing, shared Wi-Fi…

6. Facilitate the activation of high-performance network connections for the enterprise premises and remote workers.

7. Provision sufficient capacity and implement adequate security for your IT infrastructure (software & hardware) that can scale and support an important number of simultaneous encrypted connections & access.

8. Provide secured corporate laptops (encrypted, hardened, using 2 authentication factors…) to enable a professional working environment.

9. Promote remote screen sharing and low definition video streaming enabling your staff to focus on the essential information without saturating network capacity.

Contact ACTAGIS for further recommendations, training and consulting services.

Take care of yourself and your family,
Jeff Primus

Author : Jeff Primus: Founder, CEO & Senior Consultant, has over 25 years of experience within information systems governance, cyber security and business continuity. Jeff, as an expert of the subject, actively implements ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 compliant Business Continuity & Security Management Systems for the public sector, SMSs and multinational companies in Switzerland, Europe and the Middle East. As a lead lecturer he teaches Security, Governance and Business Continuity topics at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, University of Geneva and HES-SO-Valais.

© 2020 Jeff Primus, ACTAGIS